In reality, this is a false dichotomy
since scientists are real people who,
although typically sincere, are
not necessarily dispassionate and
objective—they are susceptible to
groupthink and confirmation bias.
Many honest evolutionists recognize
that philosophical assumptions, politics, and personal agendas play significant roles in the scientific enterprise.
4, 5 In general, although various
evolutionary models and mechanisms
are debated, the overarching evolutionary paradigm itself is taken as a
given and not open to question.
6 Also,
in academia and other arenas, there
is tremendous persecution of those
who doubt evolution, as has been
thoroughly documented.
7

“We can’t take all of the Bible literally”

There is a tendency to (mis) char-acterize the YEC hermeneutic as astrictly literalistic interpretation,and then to defeat this straw man bypointing out that nobody believes “thesun is literally rising” (pp. 67, 118,

177). This is an inexcusable distortion,
and completely fails to interact with
the thoughtful exegetical arguments
that creationists have been making for
decades. We abide by objective rules
for determining the meaning of any
given text, so there is no inconsistency
or arbitrariness when we regard some
passages as making literal, historical
claims and others as employing figurative language.

“Genesis does not describe how God
created”

A moment’s reflection would falsify this assertion, but it is endlessly
repeated by theistic evolutionists
nonetheless (pp. 43, 50, 93, 171). One
must wonder why so much detail is
given in Genesis chapters 1 and 2
if God is totally unconcerned about
communicating something of the
manner in which He made things. On
the contrary, the text gives readers
time markers and an order of events;

it mentions the raw materials from
which God fashioned Adam and Eve;
and more. So on what basis do theistic
evolutionists reject these statements?
Jesus and the New Testament authors
affirmed these details about how God
created, but the contributors fail to
engage with the relevant NT texts.
8, 9

“God accommodated ancient Near
Eastern (ANE) science”

This claim is a veiled denial of
inerrancy, since it asserts that the
Bible contains affirmations about the
natural world which are false (pp. 43,
50, 102, 146, 148). Several contributors
appeal to John Walton, in particular,
who teaches that Genesis, along with
other ANE documents, is not even
describing the origins of material
things (pp. 33, 93, 116, 118). With
a nod to Richard Dawkins’ famous
quip about Darwin and atheism,
10 one
writer goes so far as to say, “Walton’s
book helped me become a biblically
fulfilled evolutionary creationist”
(p. 118). But Walton’s interpretation
is preposterous on its face, and has
been shown to thoroughly contradict
Scripture.
11, 12

More faulty arguments

“YEC is a late theological innovation”

James K.A. Smith’s essay repeats
the old nonsense that Ronald Numbers’
book, The Creationists, “demonstrates
the utter novelty of young-earth
creationism as a biblical hermeneutic”
(p. 25). Smith completely ignores documentation proving that YEC has
been the dominant view throughout
church history, held by the N T authors,
the Early-Church Fathers, medieval
theologians, the Reformers, and the
19th-century Scriptural Geologists—
all predating the birth of the modern
creationist movement.
13–15

Figure 1. No mainstream creationist ministry has ever taught that dinosaur bones are fake, yet
several contributors cite bad arguments like this as among their reasons for embracing evolution.